GUTS

A cracker of a pop album, bringing guitars back to the foreground, while also showing off her voice and attitude. One minor quibble is that the link took me to the (slightly shitty) 'clean' version of the album, with no scary swearing and, more importantly, missing the excellent bonus tracks of the GUTS (spilled) version - it's well worth finding the upgraded expanded album. An album I have listened to a few times, thanks to my daughter loving it, and an artist I hope to see given time and space to develop her sound and style. Wonderful

I wasn’t too excited to listen to the kids’ music - my connection to this album initially being only awareness of the artist’s name. I pressed play and expected the kind of sort of annoying vocal shenanigans that I hear in a lot of music. Well, it does sound like modern music, but those first three songs floored me with their clever catchy designs. Someone did a good job writing music for her… What?! SHE cowrote all of this? Before her 21st year?! This is so much fun. Maybe the kids will be able to keep things going after all…

Still not sure if this is gonna stand the test of time like I think brat will but I still love this album. So catchy, so fun and probably better than sour. I went to the concert for this album and will always remember people sitting down/leaving while Chappell roan opened lol.

Great poppy rock album of Olivia Rodrigo. It was one of the highlights of 2023. Normally I would say it is too mainstream for me, but the vocals, production and very catchy songs cannot amount to less than four stars

I’m sure this is me just showing my age but this modern poo album feels like it’s trying way too hard to be cool while not being actually good enough for generic pop. Rodrigo’s voice isn’t really that great. She’s either singing softly or doing some pop rap style that both mask any real range. Being a pop artist now is more about star marketing than actual talent. 3.0/10

Great album, awesome talent. Easy 5 stars, this was on my short list of albums to add myself. She has really restored my faith in modern music. I do much prefer her punky rage to the ballads and this one has a better upbeat bop to ballad ratio than her debut. A fine choice OP.

Further leaving behind her Disney persona with this album. Angst is present but so are great lyrics.

Find her to be a pretty interesting pop artist. She has the singer-songwriter pop star vibe and though still writes a lot about high school romantic topics... its not all starry eyed, naive songs of love and loss. Edgy and snarling at times. Definitely fun. Vampire is a fantastic track.

Rating: 8/10 Best songs: All-American bitch, bad idea right, Vampire, Get him back, Teenage dream

Actually great. Some bloat after the killer opening stretch but mostly pitch perfect pop punk

Interesting, haven't encounters this person before. Very talented, a lot of variety. A little heavy on the young romance angst angle but I guess if the shoe fits, just can't relate so much these days. Excellent writing and I'd like to see more of it turned to other topics besides bad boy did me wrong. But that's pop, and still great.

Pop, rock, pop rock, alternative rock, pop-punk, power pop, alt-pop, indie pop. Buena voz. Un 4, venga.

I was not expecting to like this. I've obviously heard of Olivia Rodrigo, but I'm honestly not sure whether I've ever heard a song by her before. I was thinking it was going to be vapid pop bullshit, but it was really good. Impressed that she co-wrote all the songs as well. Too often with pop artists they are just a face and a voice, with a giant team of writers and producers behind the scenes, but seems to be not the case here. 4 stars.

She has a lot of Chappell Roan in her, and I mean that as a compliment! Pretty good 2020s girl pop!

I quite liked Guts, it explodes out of the gate with three crackers, especially bad idea right? and vampire, then yeah it loses a bit of momentum but I think rescues it quite well with get him back!, love is embarrassing and pretty isn't pretty at the back end of the album. especially that last one, it's a great modern pop song. The ballad to close it out with teenage dream is good too; if I'm comparing this to Charli xcx or Chappell Roan I'm putting it above brat but below The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess, so a high 3 or a low 4, I'm fairly impressed here.

5% battery left in my phone. I decide to not plug it now, and so end my review before I'm out of juice. That will force me to make it short for once. Listening to Olivia Rodrigo's GUTS made me want to revisit my overlong review of Chappell Roan's *The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess* and actually edit it to include that other record in my "maybe" list (after refusing to do so at first). Just as I'm doing right now with *GUTS*. Sure, both albums straddle the fine line between witty, imaginative pop songwriting / production and very standardized lines of thoughts to make the songs more palatable for mainstream audiences. Yet I get why they do this somehow. For Olivia, that standardization hearkens back to nineties "alt-rock" aesthetics, which shrewdly allow her to speak to both teenage girls / young adults and older guys whose musical references never went further the year 2000. Two markets, one stone. A little too easy, but smart nonetheless. When you see the (for me) impeccable music tastes of the person who submitted this album, you somehow get the idea that this sort of overexposed pop can still manage to talk to demanding music listeners. Which is no small feat, very objectively. Not that the idea to submit this sort of record would have occured to me. And just like for Chappell, if I had had my say on the final "product", I would have edited out two or three cuts from this thing (here ballads that bring nothing really thrilling to the table -- Chappell's ballads are better overall, by the way). For the rest, you have the usual female vocal pyrotechnics over quite a lot of electric guitar, and depending on your mileage on those sort of vocals, you can either find this performance effective or tiring. My mileage being quite neutral, I can live with most of those songs, I guess. I don't know how many modern women pop singers I can include in my list of keepers without looking like a complacent consumer of whatever "popular" phenomenon is routinely churned out by the music industry, but I would lie if I said there is no craft and care poured into those sorts of records. Oh, I almost forgot: "Vampire" is a hell of a good song. There, I said it. Now, thank you for allowing me to make it short, Olivia. I can't say if it took you "guts" to co-write and record this album, but at least you managed to leave a somewhat memorable imprint on this li 3.5/5 for the purposes of this list of essential albums, rounded up to 4 8.5/10 for more general purposes (5+3.5) Number of albums from the original list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 465 Albums from the original list I *might* include in mine later on: 288 Albums from the original list I won't include in mine: 336 ---- Number of albums from the users list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 20 Albums from the users list I *might* select for mine later on: 34 (including this one) Albums from the users list I won't select for mine: 64 --- Émile, j'ai donc lu tes deux dernières réponses. Je mets la mienne ci-dessous bientôt. 🙂

Fine Taylor Swift core but with an electric guitar 3 Vampire is a banger tho

This was fun, although for a relatively short album, a lot of this feels like filler. Frequently catchy and energetic, but Rodrigo's vocals fall flat for me about half the time. Fave Songs: Vampire, All-American Bitch, Making the Bed

Mixed bag quality wise

Pleasant surprise, this one. A tightly produced pop-rock record that punches above its weight. It blends energetic high school rock with sugary ballads and the album is surprisingly varied and self-assured. Lyrically, I'm not that interested in it, because it’s not aiming at the life experience of a 40-something year old man. But my inner teenage girl? She had a good time. "Vampire" stood out as the clear single for good reason: it’s sharp, dramatic, and catchy as hell. And while not every song reaches that same level, there’s more than enough on here to keep it interesting Olivia wears her Alanis influence proudly, and honestly, every generation needs its own cathartic, angst-filled, high school rock heroine.

I’d give this a 3.5, this was a fun album. I do think that love/breakups make for some of the most compelling songs. “Bad idea right”, “vampire”, and “lacy” were all intriguing songs to me. I may revisit this one.

A strong enough sophomore album from one of the biggest and most exciting pop stars in the game right now. I don’t think it’s as strong as her debut, which was a breath of fresh air and contained banger after banger, but it shows some growth and a bit more range as an artist rather than playing things too safe. Vampire gets the plaudits and it’s a great song (if maybe not as good as Drivers Licence, the emotional centrepiece of the previous record) but the other two singles really stand out for me too. The punky/new wave of Bad Idea Right with its fuzzy guitar solo and the chant-along anthem Get Him Back really push Rodrigo’s sound into uncharted territory to great success. It’s not as consistent as the debut and not one I’ve really found myself returning to, but it’s still a huge record and makes me excited for whatever she does next

All American bitch

I'm not really the target audience. But this album was alright to listen to

This played and I listened

Fine, but this stuff will date faster than milk.

I wasn't expecting to like this nearly as much as I did

Iv listen to sour before but not this one. I’d had thought the first album had more argument to be included in the list. This isn’t really my type of music, but can appreciate why it could be included in the list. It’s good pop guitar music.

Appreciated some of the heavier instrumentals by top 40 pop standards, hearing some overdriven guitar and punchy drums was nice given how bland most mainstream efforts can sound. That being said, I found myself getting bored at how thematically narrow this LP treads – Rodrigo has a powerhouse voice, but most of the tracks here cover such familiar ground (heartbreak, getting back with your ex, FOMO, etc.) that even Amy Winehouse couldn't breathe life into how banal the songwriting is. Would love to hear an instrumentally similar LP with some good, challenging lyricism behind it, would absolutely kill with Rodrigo's passionate vocals and not fall flat like the Top 40 retreads here.

A mate demanded I listen to this album when it came out. It wasn't very interesting then. Listening this morning, it still isn't. And the lyrical themes are just so fuckin bland. 2/5.

OK, going in with as open a mind as possible as I'm not adverse to good pop. Initial impressions: it's that annoying whisper singing that's popular at the moment, plus 2001 era pop rapping plus dropping sexual references and the occasional approved swear to be edgy for the 12 year olds this is targeted at. As the album goes on; ok here's the over produced ballad, then another one. Then a kind of upbeat song but it's clear it's aimed at high school kids, which is fine but own that if that's what you're going for. The last half of the album follows the same pattern and every song blends into each other, it's clear they put the most "Listenable" songs at the start of the album. Overall, super forgettable unless you're 13 and hanging on every "deep" lyric about how you're super special and tortured. It's albums like this that makes me not worried about AI in the music industry as humans produce the most generic dirge by ourselves. 1.6

Instrumentation as generic as it gets, lyrics sounding like they were written by a fifteen year old, 26 people working on the production - now we're cooking with gas. Unfathomably boring. [GIRLYPOP-SERIAL_NUMBER-3291394] doesn't bring anything interesting to the table. Comparing this to the other (actually good) contemporary pop artists on the user list like Chappell Roan and Charli xcx, this is a slab of tofu.